Since the genome sequence of the coronavirus was released back in January, more than 160 vaccines are currently in development, with 25 already being tested on humans, and world leaders have pledged a total of $8 billion (£6.5bn) to the cause. Developing a vaccination typically takes five to seven years but experts estimate that, thanks to previous research on different strands of coronavirus (eg outbreaks of SARS in 2002 and MERS in 2012) and the number of people working together, it’s possible that a year to 18 months could be a realistic timeline, although some institutions might get there even quicker. Click or scroll through what leading companies are doing in the race to find a COVID-19 vaccine. All dollar amounts in US dollars.

In early April US biopharmaceutical companies Amgen and Adaptive teamed up to develop either a treatment for those already suffering from the disease or a preventative vaccine for COVID-19. In collaborating, the medical companies are bringing together Adaptive’s immune medicine platform, which will identify the necessary virus-neutralising antibodies, and Amgen’s experience in immunology and novel antibody therapy development.

Adaptive is currently identifying the naturally-occurring antibodies produced by people who have already recovered from COVID-19. Amgen will then take that information and use it to engineer antibodies designed to bind and neutralise the virus. Since the collaboration launched, Adaptive has also joined forces with Microsoft to collect and analyse data on patients who have been exposed to, or had, the virus. Amgen is one of the six pharmaceutical giants to have agreed to share information with other companies working on coronavirus treatments and vaccines, such as details about manufacturing, capacity, and raw materials, in order to speed up the development process. While the US Justice Department approved the sharing of information in late July, the companies cannot reveal production costs or pricing as it could lead to anti-competitive behaviour.

German clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company CureVac specialises in pioneering Messenger RNA (mRNA)-based drugs, which use carefully designed molecules to make the body develop its own medicine. In mid-March, the company confirmed that it would be turning its focus to developing a coronavirus vaccine, and by mid-June the company got the green light to begin Phase 1 testing of its vaccine in humans in Germany and Belgium. This was announced days after the German government invested €300 million ($355m/£270m) in the project. However, CureVac's vaccine – called CVnCoV – was not the first to go into human trials, and it will have to go through several rounds of testing before it's known if it's effective. 

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That said, CureVac has a long history of working on mRNA-based vaccines, having recently developed a successful anti-rabies programme, and hopes to be the first to bring an mRNA-based vaccine to the market. The EU's lending arm the European Investment Bank approved a €75 million ($82m/£66m) investment into the company in the hope that it will have similar success in tackling coronavirus. The funding will be provided in three instalments of €25 million ($29m/£23m) based on pre-determined milestones in the development process. CureVac is looking at production and distribution methods for its future vaccine, and at the start of July a new partnership with car manufacturer Tesla was unveiled. The automaker is building mobile molecular printers that are capable of reproducing CureVac’s vaccine candidate, as well as other potential mRNA-based treatments.

Biopharmaceutical companies Dynavax Technologies Corporation and Sinovac Biotech Ltd. announced that they are working together to develop a vaccine to prevent COVID-19. Sinovac provides biopharmaceutical products in China, while Californian company Dynavax’s strengths lie in developing and commercialising innovative vaccines. 

The drug will consist of Sinovac’s coronavirus vaccine candidate with the addition of Dynavax’s adjuvant, an ingredient used in some vaccines to create a stronger immune response, CpG 1018. Prior to the pandemic, CpG 1018 was only approved in an adult Hepatitis B vaccine, but it's thought that it will also be successful in immunising people against COVID-19. Phase 3 trials on Sinovac’s candidate commenced in mid-July in Brazil, which is one of the countries worst affected by the COVID-19 outbreak. The study will involve vaccinating 9,000 healthcare professionals working on the frontline with coronavirus patients. Sinovac’s home country China has also loaned $1 billion (£770m) to South America and the neighbouring Caribbean islands for access to the vaccine when it is ready.

This vaccine has yet to finish Phase 2 testing – which typically involves up to a couple of hundred participants in order to test the dosage levels – while other groups have already reached Phase 3 and are testing thousands of people. The Gamaleya Institute is expecting to carry out the next step in the process alongside the vaccination of medical workers. This Russian vaccine differs from most others in development, as it is made up of two vectors rather than one, and will require a second booster shot at a later date. Kirill Dmitriev (pictured), the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund that is financing the vaccine, suggested that this would be another “Sputnik moment” – referring to the successful launch of the world's first satellite by the Russians in 1957 – and that Russia will be the first country to be immune to COVID-19. 

GeoVax is a US biotechnology company that develops human immunotherapies and vaccines against cancers and infectious diseases. When scientists in Wuhan released the genome code for COVID-19, GeoVax agreed to collaborate with Chinese vaccine developer BravoVax. Under the arrangement, Bravovax will provide testing and manufacturing support in China to Geovax once it has produced suitable vaccine candidates. Smallpox (pictured) and monkeypox vaccines produced by GeoVax have also been approved for distribution by the US Food and Drug Administration in the last year – a successful outcome which the company is hoping to replicate with its COVID-19 efforts.

During a presentation on emerging infectious diseases, GeoVax’s former chief scientific officer Farshad Guirakhoo (pictured) discussed how the company was looking to create a vaccine. He stated that a number of candidates had already been designed, and that they would be ready to go through animal testing in late March, before a final vaccine candidate would be tested on human volunteers. Guirakhoo also mentioned that the viral basis of GeoVax’s vaccine vector already had 50 years of safety records, and so the company’s vaccine should be able to become a licensed drug much quicker than new, unproven technologies proposed by other companies.

GlaxoSmithKline is one of the best-known names in pharmaceuticals, and the company is responsible for a huge number of medications that we already depend upon, such as malaria and HPV vaccinations. Sanofi is headquartered in France and is equally relentless when it comes to eradicating illness with its medicines. An alliance between them – companies which normally compete aggressively on vaccine development – is unprecedented, but is indicative of just how big a global health emergency this is. Together, the companies have the largest capability for producing vaccines in the world, which is a significant factor given that the rollout of this vaccine would need to be global, requiring hundreds of millions of doses. 

A candidate vaccine is expected to enter Phase 1 and 2 clinical trials in September 2020, with the companies hoping to have a fully-fledged vaccine available by the end of 2021. The partnership is working to create an adjuvanted vaccine, which is a combination of an antigen, which stimulates an immune response and produces antibodies, and an adjuvant. Adding an adjuvant to the antigen boosts the immune response. This means that less antigen is required per dose so more vaccine doses can be manufactured. GSK and Sanofi’s development has been considered promising enough that on 29 July the UK confirmed a deal of 60 million doses of the vaccine at a cost of £500 million ($650m), while on 31 July the US government bought 100 million doses of the vaccine, with the option to secure 500 million more, for $2.1 billion (£1.6bn). To date this is the largest amount of funding released by America's Operation Warp Speed programme, which is dedicated to providing substantial qualities of an effective vaccine for Americans by January 2021.

US biotech company Heat Biologics and the University of Miami are using Heat’s gp96 platform to research and produce a vaccine to immunise against COVID-19. The platform has already been used to tackle SIV/HIV, zika and malaria, and Heat announced that it would start working towards a COVID-19 vaccine with the university back in March. The focus of the programme is to insert different protein regions of the virus into the platform, which should generate long-term immune responses that could be effective against multiple strands of coronavirus. At the end of July, Heat Biologics reported that pre-clinical testing has gone well so far, with the candidate vaccine effectively killing the virus cells in animal lungs. The company's CEO Jeff Wolf has also said that this vaccine would be particularly well-suited to the elderly and those with underlying health conditions.

Heat and the university also hit the headlines in March for their work developing a new "patient-friendly" method of testing for coronavirus. The test would require patients to take a throat swab and results should be ready within 30 minutes. This would be considerably more efficient than the process currently in place, as the long wait for results has been highlighted as a contributing factor in the increasing number of cases in the US. 

Finding vaccinations that work against cancers and infectious diseases is the usual remit of this American biotechnology company, but like most pharmaceutical companies at the moment Inovio has stepped up to the coronavirus challenge. On 6 April, the company initiated the Phase 1 clinical trial of INO-4800, the drug that it has produced, and 40 healthy volunteers in Philadelphia and Kansas City were tested. By the end of June an impressive 94% of participants had shown effective immune responses six weeks after being vaccinated. Inovio is now expanding its Phase 1 trial to introduce older participants, while the next phases of testing is due to start over the summer period.

Inovio hopes to have a million doses of the drug ready for additional trials and emergency use by the end of 2020, and is also part of the US Government’s Operation Warp Speed, which is aiming to have a vaccine ready by January 2021. There has been uncertainty as to whether a suitable drug could be found at all, but Inovio’s research and development chief Kate Broderick recently told journalists that she is “completely confident” that a safe and effective coronavirus vaccine will be developed.

This June vaccine trials on hamsters proved successful in Ness Ziona, Israel, after scientists at the Israel Institute for Biological Research (IIBR) were instructed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to start work on a vaccine in February. The institute was due to start human trials at the beginning of July, with the hope that a suitable drug would be ready for mass distribution by the coming winter. Israel’s US ambassador David Friedman recently visited the IIBR, as it is currently seeking approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for its vaccine candidate.

Although the first cases of coronavirus in the UK were only confirmed in late January, scientists in Oxford had already started working on a vaccination. The group is certainly a front-runner in the race to find a vaccine, having previously developed a vaccine for Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), the coronavirus outbreak that hit Saudi Arabia in 2012, and it is continuing to see positive results with its current vaccine candidate, which is based on a chimpanzee adenovirus vaccine vector (ChAdOx1).

Following successful trials on six rhesus racaque monkeys in March, further testing on more than 1,000 healthy volunteers continued to show positive results. The vaccine is now in its final stage of development and is being tested on 5,000 volunteers in Brazil. Preliminary results will be available in November, and the plan is to involve volunteers from the UK, US, and South Africa, and bring the total number of test subjects to around 50,000. The teams in Oxford have also formed a landmark partnership with global pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca for the future mass production and distribution of any vaccine produced, while the UK government has given the project £20 million ($24.7m) and has pre-ordered 100 million doses. In May America's Operation Warp Speed put $1.2 billion (£915m) behind AstraZeneca and this vaccine.

Johnson & Johnson, one of the biggest names in the healthcare sector, together with the US government's Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), has committed over $1 billion (£799m) to developing a COVID-19 vaccine. By the end of March, the company had announced its lead candidate vaccine, and on 30 July it revealed promising results from tests carried out on primates. The first in-human trials are reported to have already started, and the company predicts that Phase 3 – the vaccine versus a placebo – will begin in September. Johnson & Johnson has also emphasised that testing the vaccine on populations that have been disproportionately affected by the virus, such as Black and Hispanic communities in the US, will be a priority. 

Johnson & Johnson anticipates that its vaccine could be ready for emergency use by early 2021, and the company intends to scale up its manufacturing so that it's capable of supplying countries all over the world. Given the current state of emergency, Johnson & Johnson is also one of several companies to have offered its future vaccine to America at its manufacturing cost, rather than seeking to profit from the global crisis. 

US biotech company Moderna was quick off the mark with its research and development, and within 25 days of the Chinese authorities having shared the genetic sequence of COVID-19 the company had completed its first clinical batch ready for analytical testing. The batch was then shipped to the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), where a Phase 1 clinical study was underway by the end of February. It was the first company to do so. The first dose of the company’s candidate drug, mRNA-1273, was administered to healthy volunteers by mid-March. Human trials on adult volunteers continued over six weeks, with all 45 subjects producing encouraging immune responses.

Although Moderna already had its mRNA platform in place before this novel coronavirus spread, this is the first time that it has been tested on humans. The therapeutics company has put its speed of development down to well-established manufacturing capabilities and a lot of prior experience in working on similar vaccines, although it has never actually brought a vaccine to the market before. On 27 July, the company was one of two to announce that it would be commencing Phase 3 of development: a 30,000-subject trial of its new drug which could enable the vaccine to be in widespread circulation by the end of 2020. Moderna is currently working in collaboration with the National Institutes of Health, and has also signed a deal with Swiss drugmaker Lonza, which would allow production of up to a billion doses of the vaccine a year.

Novavax is a clinical-stage biotechnology company split between Maryland in the US and Uppsala in Sweden. Its experts are specialists in the field of serious infectious diseases, and they have put together a potential vaccine called NVX-CoV2373. Novavax has used its nanoparticle technology to manufacture the drug, and it will include the company’s trademark adjuvant, Matrix-M, to enhance immune responses and the production of antibodies.

When tested on animals, NVX-CoV2373 has shown itself to be an "ideal vaccine candidate", and the company moved onto human trials in late May. Gregory Glenn, the company’s MD and President of Research and Development, has cited funding from the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness (CEPI) organisation, good initial results, and the "heroic efforts" of the team as reasons for the vaccine’s impressive projected progress. Novavax is another company to be involved with America’s Operation Warp Speed programme. So far it has received government funding of $1.6 billion (£1.2bn), despite never having actually brought a vaccine to market in its 33-year history. 

American pharmaceuticals giant Pfizer has teamed up with German immunotherapeutics specialists BioNTech in an attempt to co-develop an mRNA-based vaccine that prevents COVID-19. The collaboration was announced in March, and by the end of April 12 healthy volunteers had already been administered with the drug. Pfizer was the second company to announce on 27 July that it will now be moving onto Phase 3 of development, which involves scaling up its trials to include 30,000 volunteers. Like Moderna, Pfizer is also hoping to have its vaccine ready for wide-spread roll out by the end of this year, which is inline with its initial projections that there was “potential” to supply millions of vaccinations by the end of 2020 “subject to technical success of the development program and approval of regulatory authorities”.

If the vaccine development continues to be as successful as it has been thus far, this programme would then be rapidly scaled up, hopefully with the capacity to have produced 1.3 billion doses by the end of 2021. Pfizer also has an agreement with the US government's Operation Warp Speed in place, whereby the company will sell 600 million vaccines to the country for $1.95 billion (£1.5bn), with the first 100 million to be delivered by the end of 2020.

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US biotechnology company Vaxart specialises in oral vaccines, rather than the more common injections, and in March it announced that it was working on an oral tablet that would immunise patients against COVID-19. Vaxart has joined forces with biopharm company Emergent BioSolutions Inc., and the companies plan to pool their knowledge of oral vaccinations and 'molecule-to-market’ development and manufacturing resources to produce a vaccine designed to help the masses. This is another project that has been given the US Government stamp of approval in terms of inclusion in the flagship Operation Warp Speed initiative, and as a result Vaxart saw its shares value soar by 66%.

An oral vaccine has huge advantages over a more traditional vaccine in terms of logistics, according to Wouter Latour, the CEO of Vaxart. A room temperature-stable tablet would be much easier to roll out on a large scale, and administration would be quicker and simpler, but that does make it trickier to produce. Development of the drug has already started, and it is expected that Emergent will be able to produce bulk amounts of the vaccine ready for Phase 1 clinical studies to start in the second half of 2020. As well as working with Vaxart, Emergent BioSolutions has signed a $628 million (£480m) deal with the US Operation Warp Speed initiative to scale production of vaccine candidates, and has also partnered with Johnson & Johnson and Novovax to assist with rolling out their vaccines when the time comes. In June, the company also signed a $87 million (£67m) manufacturing deal with AstraZeneca, followed by a further $174 million (£134m) deal in late July.

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Another company that has partnered with GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) is Vir Biotechnology, a San Francisco-based clinical-stage immunology lab with expertise in fighting infectious diseases using cutting-edge technologies. GSK is going to make a $250 million (£200m) equity investment in the company in return for use of the smaller company’s advanced equipment and knowledge.

Vir Biotechnology had a running start when it came to cracking COVID-19, as the company had already mapped out several antibodies that may be able to neutralise SARS-CoV-2 (the virus which causes COVID-19) thanks to previous research. Vir was also looking for people who have already recovered from the disease to donate their blood for further research, but thanks to an overwhelming response it no longer requires donors. 

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